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Topic: Jews in medieval history Posted: 24-Aug-2004 at 06:12 |
Im doing a school work about non-european cultures, and wonder if jews are considered as belonging to the non-european cultures. And if you think they do belong to that "group", then can you please tell me about them during medieval time.
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boody4
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Posted: 24-Aug-2004 at 10:42 |
In my opinion, they belong to the European culture as much as the Arabs do. Contributed a lot to the history and culture, but originally from the Middle East. It's the same thing as saying if the Chinese are part of the European culture.
Just to clear this up for you, the first Jews were from the Mesopotamian Empire and there was this man who heard God speak to him and say to only worship one god and stuff (They taught this to us in Religions and Religious Cultures class). And so that man got a bunch of people and they went out to search for the Promised land. That's all that I remember.
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Genghis
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Posted: 24-Aug-2004 at 14:31 |
That man was Abraham.
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boody4
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Posted: 24-Aug-2004 at 23:37 |
Ya I wanted to write Abraham, but i wasn't sure if it was him or not.
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Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 02:25 |
Originally posted by boody4
In my opinion, they belong to the European culture
as much as the Arabs do. Contributed a lot to the history and culture,
but originally from the Middle East. It's the same thing as saying if
the Chinese are part of the European culture.
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You got a point there, but the jews never really got in to Europe as a
part of the European society (which is a important part of "building" a
culture), they have always been little of a outsider in my opinion.
They have truly brought something to the European culture, but never
been part of it. Same as the Arabs and the Chinese.
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Cywr
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Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 04:55 |
Many Jewish people living in Europe, created a distinctivly 'European' Jewish sub-culture, even languages (Ladino, Yiddish) etc.
So its all down to how you view things, do you view all Jews as one
single culture group, or do you take into account the regional
varieties.
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Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 05:58 |
I have plans for seeing the jews as one large cultural-group. But if I do find large differences in how they were treated, I may have to consider to break them up in smaller sub-cultural groups.
Do any of you know of a web-page that tells a lot about them and their problems, advantages and how they lived during the medieval time?
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boody4
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Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 11:18 |
Originally posted by Boiz
Originally posted by boody4
In my opinion, they belong to the European culture as much as the Arabs do. Contributed a lot to the history and culture, but originally from the Middle East. It's the same thing as saying if the Chinese are part of the European culture.
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You got a point there, but the jews never really got in to Europe as a part of the European society (which is a important part of "building" a culture), they have always been little of a outsider in my opinion. They have truly brought something to the European culture, but never been part of it. Same as the Arabs and the Chinese.
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Exactly, I mean I'm Polish and I know a Polish Jew descendant(from the mother's side) who lives here in Canada and the person told me that her mother's parents never knew a single word of Polish when they fled WW2. Even though the people have been living in the country for hundreds of years. If that says "I'm not European", I don't what does!
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fastspawn
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Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 11:51 |
Originally posted by Genghis
That man was Abraham. |
But abraham was not the one that brought them in search of the promised land, it was Moses.
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Cywr
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Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 12:21 |
Originally posted by boody4
Originally posted by Boiz
Originally posted by boody4
In my opinion, they belong to the European culture as much as the
Arabs do. Contributed a lot to the history and culture, but originally
from the Middle East. It's the same thing as saying if the Chinese are
part of the European culture.
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You got a point there, but the jews never really got
in to Europe as a part of the European society (which is a important
part of "building" a culture), they have always been little of a
outsider in my opinion. They have truly brought something to the
European culture, but never been part of it. Same as the Arabs and the
Chinese.
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Exactly, I mean I'm Polish and I know a Polish Jew
descendant(from the mother's side) who lives here in Canada and
the person told me that her mother's parents never knew a single word
of Polish when they fled WW2. Even though the people have been living
in the country for hundreds of years. If that says "I'm not
European", I don't what does! |
IIRC, didn't many Polish Jews speak Yiddish?
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Ptolemy
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Posted: 25-Aug-2004 at 20:47 |
But abraham was not the one that brought them in search of the promised land, it was Moses. |
Actually I think it was both. Abraham left Mesopotamia because God told him of the promised land. His descendents wen tot Egypt to escape a drought.
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vagabond
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Posted: 26-Aug-2004 at 03:46 |
Boiz -
Which Jews? I think you need to decide where to focus. There were and are non-European Jews - during the middle ages Jews were spread throughout the Islamic kingdoms from east of Persia across Arabia and North Africa and into the Iberian peninsula. Most of these groups would qualify as a non-European culture. At the same time there were Jews who were (and are) an integral part of european culture - with (once) thriving communities in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, England, Poland, Russia...
The history of the Jews as a part of European culture goes back as far as the Roman Empire. It was during Roman times that communities of Jews grew in Greece, Italy, southern France, and Iberia. European lawmakers from Roman times - through Charlemagne and the Visigoths - Henry II in England and St. Louis in France, and several German Kingdoms all considered legislation regarding their Jewish populations.
The Bretons, Cornish, Basques, Catalans and many other small groups held onto their own languages into the 19th century. Gothic and Slavic emigrants brought their languages with them. How are Yiddish and Ladino different from these languages?
Almost two thousand years of Jewish presence in Europe would qualify them, I believe, as a European culture. There were Jews in much of Europe before there were Angles and Saxons in England, yet as far as I know no one has disputed the Englishness of those of Anglo-Saxon heritage. The Goths and the Visigoths arrived later, as did many other groups who immigrated to various parts of Europe. The Slavs arrived in Europe after the 4th century, but no one would say that Slavs are not a European culture. From the time that they established residence in Europe, all of those groups are considered European. By what logic are the European Jews non-European?
Any of the groups of Ashkenazim, and all the Jews in England, France, the Low Countries, and descendants of the Iberian Sepherdim who settled in other parts of Europe are certainly European. You could consider any of the further branches of the Sephardim (North African, Iraqi, Syrian..) as the focus of your project.
A few places to start:
General links on jewish History
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/jewish/jewishsbook.html
http://ddickerson.igc.org/judaica.html
http://worldzone.net/religion/jewishhistory/
http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishhistory/
Specific to Sephardim:
http://www.orthohelp.com/geneal/SEPH_who.HTM
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Sephardi m.html
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boody4
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Posted: 26-Aug-2004 at 10:45 |
Originally posted by Cywr
IIRC, didn't many Polish Jews speak Yiddish?
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Yes they did, but I'm just saying that historically speaking their culture began in the Middle East. It evolved to be very close to European but it's always been "Jewish". If you go to some places in north America where there are people like Hassidic Jews I doubt the first thing in your mind will be he's European, you're gonna think he's Jewish. So what I'm saying is that the Jewish culture has evolved over time to be similar to the European culture but they've always tried to keep it Jewish.
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Rava
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Posted: 26-Aug-2004 at 11:38 |
Vagabond wrote:Which Jews? I think you need to decide where to focus....
I heard about the teory that perhaps majority of Jews dwelled in Central Europe were in fact Khazars.
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Cywr
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Posted: 26-Aug-2004 at 11:44 |
IIRC, that theory is extremely iffy.
If you go to some places in north America where there are people like
Hassidic Jews I doubt the first thing in your mind will be he's
European, you're gonna think he's Jewish. |
In my mind, Jewish and European are not mutualy exclusive, but then,i
grew up in the Netherlands where there are many Jews who are, well,
Dutch.
So what I'm saying is that
the Jewish culture has evolved over time to be similar to the European
culture but they've always tried to keep it Jewish. |
Well, duh, its a religion, that don't tend to change much.
But culturaly, they formed a distinctivly European take on the whole
Jewish thing, even evolved languages around it - Yiddish (middle
German, with some Hebrew mixed in) and Ladino (Spanish dialect, again
with some Hebrew).
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Posted: 26-Aug-2004 at 13:07 |
Originally posted by Cywr
But culturaly, they formed a distinctivly European take on the whole
Jewish thing, even evolved languages around it - Yiddish (middle
German, with some Hebrew mixed in) and Ladino (Spanish dialect, again
with some Hebrew).
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Ladino is not a Spanish but an Italian dialect.
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Cywr
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Posted: 26-Aug-2004 at 13:11 |
Oh, i thought it was Andalucian Spanish with some Portugese or something.
Nevermind.
But wait, there IS a Spanish aswell one no?
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Posted: 26-Aug-2004 at 13:25 |
I had a look at Wikipedia:
Indeed Ladino (aka Judeo-Spanish) is a Spanish dialect:
Originally posted by Wikipedia
adino is a Romance language, derived mainly
from Old Castilian and Hebrew (Spanish). Speakers are exclusively
Sephardic Jews. The language is also called
Judaeo-Spanish, Sefardi, Dzhudezmo, Judezmo, and
Spanyol; haquita (from the Arabic haka حكى, "tell") refers to the
dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. The dialect of the Oran area of Algeria
was called Tetuani or Tetauni, after the Moroccan
town Tetouan, since many Oranais Jews came from
this city.
According to the Ethnologue,
- The name 'Dzhudezmo' is used by Jewish linguists, 'Judeo-Espanyol' by Turkish Jews; 'Judeo-Spanish' by Romance philologists;
'Ladino' by laymen, especially in Israel; 'Hakitia' by Moroccan Jews; 'Spanyol' by some others.
Sometimes "Ladino" is reserved for a very Hebraicized form used in religious translations as in the Ferrara Bible.
Like Old Spanish, Ladino keeps the /S/ and /Z/ palatal phonemes, both changed to /x/ in modern Spanish. But unlike
Old Spanish, it has an /x/ phoneme taken over from Hebrew. It has also developed certain characteristic usages, such as
muestro for nuestro (our). The structure is linguistically related to Spanish, with the addition of many terms from the Hebrew, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic languages depending on where the speakers resided.
Today, Ladino is most commonly written with the Latin
alphabet, especially in Turkey. However, it is still sometimes written in the
Hebrew alphabet (especially in Rashi characters), a practice that
used to be much commoner (called aljamiado, by analogy with Arabic
usage.) The usage of Greek and Cyrillic alphabets was also found in the past, but is rare nowadays. Following the decimation of
Sephardic communities throughout much of Europe (particularly the Balkans) during the Second World
War, the greatest proportion of speakers remaining were Turkish Jews. As a result
the Turkish variant of the Latin alphabet is widely used for
publications in Ladino.
History
During the Middle Ages, Jews were instrumental in the development of Castilian into a prestige language. In the Toledo School
of Translators, erudite Jews translated Arabic and Hebrew works (often translated earlier from Greek) into Castilian and
Christians translated again into Latin for transmission to Europe.
Until recent times, the language was widely spoken throughout the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa, having
been brought there by Jewish refugees fleeing Spain following the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. It was the most used language in Salonica until after World War I, and remained widespread there until the death of 55,000 Salonican Greek
Jews in the Holocaust during the Second World War. Over time, a corpus of literature, both liturgical and secular, developed.
During the Jewish
Enlightenment, as Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire studied in schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Ladino drew from French for neologisms.
In the twentieth century, the number of speakers declined sharply: entire communities were eradicated in the Holocaust, while the remaining speakers, many of whom migrated to Israel, adopted Hebrew. At the same time, it
aroused the interest of philologists since it conserved language and literature which existed prior to the standardisation of
Spanish.
Many native speakers today are elderly immigrants, who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren,
however it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardic communities. In addition, Sephardic communities in several Latin
American countries still use Ladino.
Folklorists have been collecting romances and other folk songs, some dating from before the expulsion.
Here is a sample of religious poetry:
Non komo muestro Dio,
Non komo muestro Sinyor,
Non komo muestro Rey,
Non komo muestro Salvador.
It is also sung in Hebrew (Ein k'Eloheynu) but the tune is different.
Qol Yerushalayim and
Radio
Nacional de Espaa hold regular radio broadcasts in Ladino.
See also: Judaism, Yiddish language, Hebrew |
The Italian language I confused with Ladino is Ladin, which is no Jewish language:
Ladin language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Although Ladin in Italian is referred as Ladino, this language should not be confused with Ladino, another name for Judaeo-Spanish
Ladin (Ladino in Italian, Ladin in Ladin) is a Rhaetian language spoken in the Dolomite mountains in
Italy, between the regions of Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto.
It presents connections with the Swiss Romansh and Friulian.
It is spoken in:
- the province of Bolzano at Ortisei (Urtiji in Ladin or
St.Ulrich in German),
- Selva di Val Gardena (Slva in Ladin or Wolkenstein in German),
- Badia (Badia),
- Corvara in Badia (Curvara),
- Marebbe (Mareo),
- the province of Trento at Canazei (Cianacei),
- Vigo di Fassa (Vich) and
- Pozza di Fassa (Pocia).
It is officially recognized in Italy and has some official rights in the region of Trentino-Alto Adige. |
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Gallipoli
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Posted: 27-Aug-2004 at 06:22 |
Did you guys know that during the 3rd crusade, the German armies massacred 600.000 Jews in Europe while marching through?
Edited by Gallipoli
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Cywr
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Posted: 27-Aug-2004 at 06:36 |
Figure seems a little high for just the one crusade.
But killing and torture of jews as well as christians who didn't see
things the 'right' way was one of the hallmarks of all the crusades
IIRC.
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